At home with power

I got a call from my wife about 2:00pm yesterday. "We have power!!" I was in the middle of a meeting and had to quash the desire to go home. I successfully managed to keep it quashed until 4:00 when I couldn't keep it down any longer. At home I cleaned out the refrigerator and the freezer before the family got home. With no food in the house, we ordered in a pizza. After dinner my wife went grocery shopping while I gave the child a bath and put him to bed. And for the post bed excitement, my wife and I watched a couple of episodes of Buffy season five before it was time for us to go to bed too.

And it was great.

400th post!

This is actually my 400th post. This has been an interesting century of posts. It feels like a bit of an anticlimax since I haven't been posting very much recently. I haven't really had or made the time to keep updating. I spent a lot of time posting from my old job as it was winding down.As I hit my stride at the new job, expect to see me return to form.

We're still without power. Actually at this point, I don't know anyone else without power, so we win. I'll be expecting my booby prize any minute now. We've been able to depend on the kindness of friends and family, which has made a tough situation easier. But there is just something about being able to spend time in your own space. There is a certain lack of familiarity, privacy, being able to do your own thing, ... that you just don't get when you are at other people's homes. I appreciate what everyone has done for us, opening up their homes and allowing us to stay, but I just want to go home.

Update: The universe has kindly relented and I get my wish. I'm going home!

Still without power

A friend recently observed that the home answering machine is the greatest remote power checker in history. However, there is something very depressing about calling yourself only to hear ring after ring go unanswered.

Update

It turns out that we are one of five houses on our street to be still without power. I think that when the branch dropped, it took out the transformer. So with 40% of our city and several hundred thousand in the area still without power, I think it'll be a while until they come investigate our little stretch of houses.

I'd say that it sucks to be us, but really up until this point, it really hasn't been too bad. We have been able to rely on the kindness of friends and family. My family stayed with Andi and her husband one night. The next night my wife retreated with Oliver up to her mother's place while I stayed with Elitsirk and her husband so that we could go for our long run. The next morning everyone who stayed there pitched in for a huge breakfast after our run. After checking on the cat, I rejoined my family at my sister-in-law's place. In the morning, my wife and I helped out with my sister-in-law's paper route. Later, I came back to the house so that I could check on the cat and get ready for work.

All that said, I am ready for the fun to be over. There is just something to be said for being in your own space with your own things.

The storm

Wednesday I was giving Oliver a bath and waiting for my wife to get home when the lights started flickering. Great, I thought, it'll be a brownout. Then I heard a crack and a thud. A few minutes later there was another crack and a loud popping sound and then we lost power. I got Oliver out of the tub and we went to investigate. We looked out at the back yard and I noticed that the sycamore tree in our neighbor's yard had dropped a limb damaging their garage and snapping the power line. I had a sinking feeling that this wasn't going to be a quick brownout. I looked at the sky to see if it was greening and I should take Oliver to shelter in the basement, but it never really got to that point. I got him dressed and we went downstairs.

Once we got downstairs, I got to see the biggest part of the damage. The tree in our front yard had split down the middle in the wind. The tree had fallen towards the house, but landed just in front of the front door. It didn't even break the screen. It turns out that it only twisted our front gutter. And all those guys who looked at trimming the tree thought it would hit the house. It was barely a grazing, guys! Inspection completed, I settled Oliver down to sleep. Until Mommy got home and the inspection had to start all over again.

Last night, I picked Oliver up from day care and stopped by the house. We were still without power and the house was starting to heat up. I started trying to saw my way though the tree that was blocking the front door but Oliver was not being cooperative. Rather than gut it out we called some friends and crashed at their place last night. After work today, we'll drop by the house again and see if the power is back on. If not, our nomadic days aren't quite at an end.

Pet peeve

One of my pet peeves is when you are talking to someone and they repeat the same word over and over again even when it doesn't fit the context of what they are saying. It's sort of like when you spent time in public speaking class counting the "Umm"s and "Errr"s of the pupil under scrutiny. One of the guys that i work with uses the word "actually" five or six times per verbal paragraph. Arrrghhh!

Now I'm LinkedIn

The very day I post about my problems losing touch with people, a friend invites me to join LinkedIn, one of those online networking sites. I spent a couple of hours looking online for friends and acquaintances. I managed to find a couple of friends from school in the list. I had the most trouble finding other people who worked at the places I did. Not because they weren't on there, but because the system was broken.

Bad dream

This morning I had a day-mare as I dreamed that I ran into my freshman roommate, Nate. What made it a day-mare instead of a dream was that I started trying to talk to him about Oliver and found out that he and his wife had had infertility problems. Mmmm love that shoe leather. Sure it isn't like the falling dream or the naked public speaking dream, but it is one of the things that I'm afraid of - losing touch with people that I was such good friends with.

I've lost touch with a lot of people over the years. Pat, who I was friends with in grade school. The guys on the cross country team in high school. My other friends from high school. My friends from college who have left the area. I know that i don't necessarily have the time to keep up with everyone, but occasionally i'll come across something and think "Cliff, would really think that was funny." and that's when I feel the loss.

More insidious than Tom's Diner!

It's one thing when you get a song stuck in your head. That happens to everyone. Just start humming the chorus of Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega and watch what happens. But what happens when you get a book stuck in your head? I've had Goodnight Moon stuck in my head for the past couple of days. It alternates with But Not the Hippopotamus on my head's internal playlist. And there really isn't anything that you can do to get it out. At least with Tom's Diner you had a chance. You could always lapse into Yellow Submarine or YMCA in order to cleanse your head. But there is no dealing with Goodnight Moon.

Hashing in the news

Every once in a while, hashers make the news. Usually it is because some flour dots are confused with some powdered virus stock, but occasionally hashers get good press. This story in the Indy Star newspaper, http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060710/NEWS01/607100413, led to a story on MSNBC, http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12579116/. Both stories painted a decent picture of what it is like to hash.

ON ON

Syriana

I watched Syriana last night and I thought it was well done, but I didn't connect with any of the characters enough to find myself really caring about their plight. The Matt Damon character is one that should have really resonated with me as the father who loses his son and is looking for something to believe in. I think it had something to do with the disjointed manner in which the story was told. Any of the characters could have made a compelling story but taken together I didn't get enough time to make the connection. On the other hand, you could argue that the point of the movie was less in the characters and more in the story or the political message of the movie, but I'd prefer to sacrifice the message in service of a more compelling and involving story.

The Full Monty

Every once in a while a movie comes along that makes you glad that you are older. I keep telling myself that I'm glad that it didn't come out when I was deeply involved in my fraternity in college as I'm sure that I could have been persuaded with only the most gentle of prodding to have joined a group of guys for our own version of the Full Monty. On the other hand, in the days before I had my own mug hanging up at Growlers, I might have looked less like the mark Addy character and more like the guy that likes to run into walls (or at least more than I currently do). I do find that it resonates more with me as I get older. The Mark Addy character who has trouble losing weight. The Robert Carlyle character who is willing to do anything to continue to see his son. Plus there is the thought that in some number of years that the software development career that I've chosen for myself could become decidedly less profitable and/or I could become scrap like them. I could always change careers then. Hmmm... maybe I really need to work on my abs...

Active weekend

In contrast to many other weekends, this one was surprisingly busy. My wife and I decided (that is to say my wife decided and I concurred) that it was time to fix up the downstairs addition. The downstairs addition was the sole remaining room in the living area that we hadn't yet worked on the walls to any significant degree. So on Thursday night we moved all of the stuff that was in the room out into the dining room and started working on it. By Friday night we had gotten much of the loose paint scraped off. Saturday we dropped Oliver off with grandma and got a layer of spackle up. It was looking like we were going to get it done this weekend.

But then we went to a family birthday party. At the party my wife talked with her brother about different rough textures that we could apply to the walls to camoflage the roughness of the surface underneath. She decided that she really liked the look of "knockdown," but it wasn't something that we were going to be able to get done ourselves due to the difficulty of doing it right. So the game plan changed from "let's finish it" to "let's just get it into a less embarassing shape."

The rest of the weekend blurred into Oliver time, spackle time, and barbecues. We put up some more spackle before we went to sleep Saturday night. Sunday I took Oliver in the morning so that my wife could get some work done. Sunday afternoon was a BBQ at a friend's place. Monday I was on Oliver watching duty. Tuesday we ran a race in the morning and then I watched Oliver while my wife took a long overdue nap. Tuesday afternoon was another BBQ and then I painted the walls white last night. We still have to move the stuff back into the room before my parents arrive on Thursday night.